The Great Wheel (23 page)

“Now. Let’s get started, shall we?”

Tim blanked the windows. John discarded his clothes. The air raised bumps on his flesh as the doctor slid out on smooth runners. He submitted to its embrace.

“You’ve got the results there?” he asked afterward.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

Tim shrugged. “There’s no problem, John. Of course there’s no problem—you have God on your side.”

John buttoned his shirt. “No isotopes?”

“There’s a little in your intestines and lungs, but it’s broadly distributed. No hot spots. The viruses haven’t deprogrammed a single precancerous cell. Not that you should worry—you of all people. You’re fit, John. To be honest, you were in a worse state before you left. There’s a record of some blip in your cpu. But it self-corrected.”

“And Laurie Kalmar. She’ll be okay too?”

“She’ll be fine,” Tim said, “unless she was digging up the dust and eating it. Of course, I don’t do the high-grade Borderer tests. It’s a separate specialization. Not that I’d mind giving it a bash. With Laurie.”

John concentrated on his socks.

“And what’s it like out there?” Tim said. “Is it really as ghastly as everyone says it is?”

“The people up in the mountains are poor. But it’s…more lifelike than here.”

“Lifelike.” Tim nodded. “That’s not a word that often comes to mind, in or outside the Zone.”

“I didn’t know you went outside much.”

“Oh…” Tim said. “Every now and then. And you got all the way there, I gather? To the site of the blast? You managed to take samples?”

“You’ve spoken to Laurie? To the engineer?”

“To neither, actually,” Tim said. “But you know what it’s like here, the way word gets around. We hardly need the net.”

“I can imagine.”

Tim gave John a glance that said he probably couldn’t, then concentrated on the screen, tapping with his fingers. The window was still blanked, and the screen’s lines of lights and letters scrolled over his face in the half darkness. John finished dressing. He had expected Tim to show more curiosity about the journey, though he knew now that the question of the contaminated koiyl in itself held little interest for him. But Tim didn’t ask how John and Laurie had got on. What they’d got up to.

“It’s a kind of holy place for the witchwomen,” John said. “I collected some fresh leaves along the way. They were fresh five days ago, anyway. And the flowers of the plant, the people in the village just gave them to me. For free.”

Tim kept his eyes on the screen. “You want me to look at them?” He seemed to be comparing sources of data, and John wondered momentarily if it was possible for Tim to tell from the readouts whether his patient had been sexually active with a Borderer woman.

“If you could. But tell me—and I know this is probably a stupid question—is there some way of filtering the isotopes out of the leaf? Some process? Or a way that people could chew the leaf without absorbing them?”

“You’re right, John—it’s a stupid question. The main contaminant at Ifri Gotal is strontium 90, which is a particularly nasty isotope because of the way it builds up inside living things. The reason it’s in the leaf, and the reason it’s finding its way into your patients’ bones, is that it’s so chemically similar to calcium that it gets absorbed along with it. It becomes part of what you are, John, and stays with you for up to thirty years. And all the while it’s emitting beta waves that have more than enough energy to kill cells, or damage them—or make them cancerous.”

“I just thought—I don’t know. That there might be some way.”

“There isn’t. But I thought you just wanted to stop the contaminated leaves being sold.” Now, that John was fully dressed, Tim cleared the windows. The purplish scum had been cleared from the lake, and the ducks were back out, bobbing like little sailboats. “But yes, I’ll take a look at the new leaves if you want.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Anyway, I have only one more appointment for this morning. What would you say to going out for a sip and a bite?”

“Sorry, Tim. It’ll have to be some other day.”

“Okay.” Tim looked down and touched his screen again. “But let me know if your hear about any free drinks—remember, like we had at Trinity Gardens?” Glancing up from beneath his fringe, he seemed almost boyish again. “You will do that, John, won’t you?”

John arrived at the little bar on Main Avenue ten minutes early. Laurie was already there.

It wasn’t quite the place he remembered. The chromium machine was still busy serving, but there was no leaving party today; the tables were little islands occupied by solitary diners. She’d sat close to the window, in the motes of light that filtered through the glass from the cherry trees outside. She looked up at him and pushed back a chair.

He sat down. His throat was tight. She’d ordered wine while she waited but no food. The waiter whizzed between them to whisk away the butts of two tubes that lay in the steel saucer, and she watched with her chin propped on her hand. Her hair was tied back today. It was cool in here, but the strands that had escaped the ribboned knot curled damp against her neck and forehead.

They settled on cannelloni from the small nonseafood section of the menu. And more wine. The food came. They discussed the koiyl. Now, at least, John had the kind of evidence the governor had been talking about. Even if John feared for the fate of the village of Lall, he had a duty to make sure that something was done…

Despite the wine, his mouth was dry, and he found it difficult to talk and swallow. Yet Laurie was still Laurie and seemed to be treating this as though it were all so ordinary, just the meeting of two friends. He wondered if there was some subtle Borderer sexual code that he, a European, had no knowledge of. Or perhaps her expression was obscured by the wonderful, continuing strangeness of her green eyes. He crossed his legs as the waiter tinkled to another table.

“Did you hear,” she asked, “what I just said?”

“I’m sorry Laurie, I was just…”

“I know. Elsewhere.”

“What was it?”

She pushed back her plate and folded her arms. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. That was how I could tell.” She tilted her head. “So what are you doing this afternoon?” There was gentle mockery there, but at least she didn’t call him Father John.

“Do you have anything planned?”

“Nothing. What about you?”

“Only things that can wait.”

“Then let them wait.”

He opened his eyes. He hadn’t thought he’d been asleep, but the glow of his watch told him that it was hours since they’d come to the bungalow. They’d made love, and afterward Laurie had gone to the bathroom, and he’d watched her shadow shift across the tiles as she stooped to wash herself. Sex was, after all, inherently messy. Now she was asleep. He raised himself up on his arm and gazed down as she lay breathing, complete, composed, with that tiny puckered scar on her upper arm. He turned over again, staring up into the dark, rubbing at the crust around his eyes, wondering why the best moments always seemed to slip away.

He felt uncomfortable, it was true, under the silver-eyed gaze of people who, no matter how careful he and Laurie were, would soon be talking about yet another priest who’d gone a little strange here in the Endless City. And all his efforts with the koiyl, the meetings he would have to attend, the studies he would try to promote, would fit in so neatly as an excuse for these frequent visits to the Zone…

He turned and saw that Laurie was awake, staring at him.

“I should go to your church,” she said, sitting up a little. “That might make it easier.”

“Make what easier?”

“To understand what all this is doing…”

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, breathing her scent, feeling the warmth of her skin.

“Did Hal ever want to be a priest?”

He smiled at the thought. “It was the last thing he’d be.”

“Is that,” Laurie said, pressing closer to him, “the reason you chose it?”

They walked out through the Zone. It was late, and quiet. The lights along the streets hummed, the occasional machine clattered by. They crossed the pale lawn past the gray spire of All Saints, where Father Orteau was just emerging. John raised a hand in acknowledgment, but the little man scuttled off through the hot wind towards his air-conditioned suite at the Hyatt, seeming not to notice them. They walked on, past the admin blocks towards the shuttleport, where lights shone out from the plain glass windows of the Borderer hostels and the sky seemed at its blackest and reddest, its most volcanic. Down by the shore, even after midnight—and in this heat—a shift was still working. Engines moaned, chains crackled, generators hummed, Borderer voices shouted. But a silence seemed to descend and the stares were hostile as John and Laurie walked by a great loading bay where a shuttle engine was being hauled up from a barge. From somewhere a frothy blob of spit patted the hot pavement in front of them.

“How long do you have left,” Laurie asked, linking his arm as they turned the corner, “in the Endless City?”

“A few months. Four. No…three.”

“You’ll go back then?”

“No. I won’t go back.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of everything.”

They walked on.

T
HIS WAS LIKE EVERY
other meeting he’d attended. There had been several about the koiyl over the last few weeks, and already they’d slipped into the general background roar of half-understood and half-acted-upon issues that pervaded the Zone. Most of the people here were deputies, or deputies of deputies, and there were several telepresences or simply empty screens. He knew that Laurie’s attendance, as a potentially koiyl-chewing Borderer herself, would have been ill judged, so he was the only person around this table who had actually been to Ifri Gotal, or who even set foot regularly outside the Zone.

The engineer who’d initially prepared the radiation counter for him had done a fine job in analyzing the pollutants of Ifri Gotal. The weapon, it seemed, had essentially been a small fusion device of a type once known as an “enhanced radiation” or “neutron” bomb. Manufactured by several nation-states in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these bombs were intended to stop armored vehicles on the battlefield by killing their occupants. Essentially, they destroyed people rather than property—which, John supposed, explained why so many vehicles and possessions had survived at Ifri Gotal.

The explosion would have been like a tiny sun, pouring out deadly rain. Under what the engineer described as “ideal conditions,” this type of bomb should have left behind relatively few long-term radioactive contaminants. This device, presumably, had been less than ideal; bought third-hand on the then-rampant nuclear weapons black market, or furtively constructed from stolen components. It was also likely, the engineer acknowledged in a chilling afterthought, that the area had then been deliberately seeded with additional contaminants to ensure that anyone else who tried to pass that way would die. John stared down at his screen, trying to imagine the state of mind of the person who had issued these orders to block the migrations from the weather-ravaged south.

The meeting was nearing an end, and Cal Edmead, the chairman, was now summing things up. He at least still came in person, and, as the governor’s deputy, was in a position of some power—if he chose to use it.

“Obviously,” Edmead was saying, “I can’t sanction any attempt to ban the trade in the koiyl leaf, even if that were possible. Imagine what it would be like if we decided to ban tubes and alcohol in the Zone.”

Laughter rippled down the table; the thought was genuinely comic.

“The success of the new kelpbeds at Medersa,” he continued, keeping his hands apart in a composed gesture of honesty, challenging anyone, John thought, to doubt the intensity of his interest, “is still in the balance. In the long run it will save far more lives than a minor—although admittedly dangerous—pollutant will ever threaten. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should simply let the matter rest. Though it is still by no means clear that a link exists between the koiyl and this blood cancer. Some cases in the reports that Father John here has kindly provided—the, ah, boy, for example—”

“You mean Daudi?”

“Yes. There was no trace of abnormally high levels of strontium 90 in his body. You say that his father chews the leaf, but it’s unlikely, isn’t it, for an illness such as cancer to be communicated via a father’s sperm?”

“That case may not fit into the pattern and may have occurred for other reasons,” John acknowledged. He glanced over at the screen from which Tim Purdoe had made himself available by telepresence, at least for the first two meetings. It was now gray.

“As you say, Father. These things are possible, but they require further study. Now…”

John sat back. Eventually the meeting rambled to an end. Further study is required—is essential—but for now, of course, nothing must be said outside this room or on unsecured portions of the net. The matter is clearly sensitive, classified, to be kept within the Zone…

“These,” John said, lifting his folder as the telepresences started to wink off, one by one, “are koiyl leaves from Lall, bought this morning on the streets of the Endless City.” He shook out a dozen onto the table. “It’s strange, really, that we’ve got this far without any of you actually seeing them.” He could feel a slight shifting away of bodies. The leaves looked black and shriveled in the clinical light of this room. Poor specimens, he had to admit.

“Here.” He took one and held it out. “Have one each. There should be enough to go around…” The committee members seemed reluctant to touch the leaves; only Cal Edmead picked one up and kept it in his hand. The other leaves were stared and prodded at but remained scattered on the table—as though these people feared a link with the disease that they spent so many meetings trying to deny. John could smell the leaves, withered though they were. Clear and astringent over the odor of midmeeting coffee and tired sweat.

“I don’t plan,” he said, “to let this matter rest. It’s probably unrealistic to expect the Zone to do much—you’re right about that, Cal. But it’s the Borderers who are at risk. I have to get the message through to them.”